TOKYO 202(1): Meet the Sports

We love the Summer Olympics here (on the blog, in our lives, etc), because, as swimmers, it is the only time people even remotely pay attention to OUR sport (especially true and close to home now that our fellow Distance Swimming QUEEN Katie Ledecky is such a household name), but the truth is there are A LOT of sports to keep track of (see what I did there? TRACK?!?!?! like the sport!). Unlike the winter games, in which all the sports basically boil down to different types of sliding (sliding on skis, on a sled, on skates, on a board, etc etc), the summer games have a lot of diverse sports, and a lot of those sports have like roughly a million events (looking at you track and field). This is a bit of a baseline for ya, to know enough about what sports are included and how they work so that you’re not like “wait, handball is a thing?” (yes, and it is one of the rare sports we Americans suck at!), and instead you can be like “ah yes, skateboarding, something that definitely is an Olympic sport” (yes, Tony Hawk is an official commentator, 12 year old me is thriving rn) . Let’s get to it, because some of these sports have ALREADY STARTED (that’s right, BEFORE opening ceremonies!!!).

Tokyo 2021 DEBUTS

Baby’s first Olympics! Tokyo will be the first Olympics to feature surfing, skateboarding, karate and climbing as sports. They were added to the Olympic Programme to try to get the YOUTHS involved. For surfing, it’s like a snowboarding, for the summer, on waves, where every wave is wildly different. Sounds easy! Expect Australia to do well, because they’re kings of the surf world. Skateboarding is also a judged competition, but it plays out more like the floor routine of gymnastics, where boarders have a two or so minutes to do a routine on the park or street. Lost? Don’t worry, Tony Hawk will be guide you! Karate has both kata & kumite competitions, and is a combat sport (more on those later). Climbing is a competition of three disciplines: speed (climb up a wall faster than your opponent), bouldering (climb a bunch of walls in a specified time), and lead (climb as high as you can in a specified time). Tbh I am chompin at the bit to watch these crazy kids climb, it sounds CRAZY.

Though not technically new to the Olympics, we’re also going to throw softball/baseball in here (yes that’s one sport, hence the field situation from our last post), as they make a return to the Olympics after 13 years! If that sounds like a funky number remember: it should have been 12! A baseball player is carrying the Team USA flag Friday, so I guess it’s a big deal. Baseball and softball will take place in typical tournament fashion, with two group matchups before elimination rounds. Arguably these should really be called the World Series since it’s actually the world and not just America but, alas, a discussion for another day.

WATER Sports

Ah, the pool, where your gals are become real, graceful athletes. Live love water sports! We’re dumping these into one category to make it easy for ya: swimming, diving, artistic (synchronized) swimming, water polo (yeah that could have gone under team sports, I don’t know what you want me to say no one is perfect), rowing, sailing, marathon (read: open water) swimming, and last but not least, canoe/kayaking. Swimming is pretty self explanatory: each event (50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500m freestyle, 200/400m IM, 100/200m of each stroke, relays) normally has prelims, semis, and finals, first person to touch the wall wins. Important to check which one you’re watching because they will air lot of these for CONTENT. Tune in hear our KING Rowdy Gaines be absolutely gobsmacked by everything the swimmers do, even though he himself was a very talented swimmer. Marathon swimming is sort of the same idea, but they do that swim 1x because it’s 10k which is A LONG SWIM (not a marathon because…. that might kill you) Please note that the triathlon (run, bike, swim, my least favorite sport because once any triathlete finds out you swim they’re like “do a triathlon!!!!” and I’m like “no!!! I’d rather die!!”) and the modern pentathlon (a sport including equestrian, fencing, swimming, shooting, running—feels like they drew the events out of a hat), also include a good ol fashioned swimming component, so we’ll throw those in here too. Sailing & Rowing are essentially speed races as well, in varying vehicles and team sizes. Diving as a competition works more like gymnastics, with judges scoring the dives (the lowest and highest scores are taken off), in competitions of pairs/synchro, platform, and springboard. Some of these are at different heights, all of them are absolutely insane and death-defying imho. Artistic Swimming aka synchro is an absolutely BUCK WILD sport that sadly NBC never features bc America sucks at it (insert bit about us being an individualistic nation rather than a collective but idk!), but it involves 1) make up 2) splits n flips 3) a stunning blend of teamwork that I cannot recommend enough. Performances are scored ⁠on synchronisation, difficulty, technique and choreography. They also have to hold their breath for like… 5 min!!! If you enjoyed Cheer, tune into synchro. If you’re looking for a sport a little more ~off road, peep the canoe/kayak sprint (yet another contest of SPEED) and the slalom, which, up until this year’s debut sports entered the chat, was the most badass event. Slalom is essentially a white water obstacle course, which is INSANE so def try to peep some of those races. Olympics more like X Games!!!!!

Team Sports

Feels like we’ve been talking about these sports for a million years but guess what! There are so many more, so we’re doing team sports as a SPEED ROUND. The team sports football, handball, hockey (on a field, and yes unlike at your high school the men play too), rugby, basketball (both 3x3 and the regular 5x5), and volleyball (court and beach). Mostly, these take place in a typical tournament format (some have pools, some have groups, but it’s the same diff) which you all should know by now because you learned about it when we talked about the EUROS. Keep up or keep moving folks!!

Indoor Sports

I realize these categories allow for redundancies but I had to break things up somehow. Indoor sports will include: artistic, rhythmic, and trampoline gymnastics, boxing, cycling track (aka velodrome), judo, table tennis, taekwondo, weightlifting, wrestling, fencing. I would say the indoor sports are always the ones I’m like, people do this in summer? sure? I guess? The gymnastics have different disciplines: artistic is the simone biles shit we know and love (including competitions in floor, beam, vault, uneven bars for ladies and floor, vault, pommel horse, horizontal bar, parallel bars for men) (they used to use the pommel horse AS THE VAULTY THING insane and very glad we got rid of that) rhythmic is the one with the toys (aka hula hoops, rubber balls, ribbons, and clubs), and trampoline is basically aerials off skis. Table Tennis aka ping pong (aka whiff whaff aka flim flam, no I am not making that up) is a tough one to watch because they go CRAZY fast, but it is also the most practiced sport in the world (supposedly). The rules of that event are a little complicated, but essentially in singles matches it’s best of seven 11-point games, doubles, and a team event that combines the two. Weightlifting is almost painful to watch (miracle they don’t shit their pants tbh): Athletes compete by performing 2 types of lifts 3 times and adding together the highest weight lifted in each. The lifts are snatch (bar is lifted from the floor to above the head in one movement) and the clean & jerk (bar is first brought up to the chest before being jerked over the head). You might know these terms if you go to the gym. I don’t so, yeah. Cycling Track aka velodrome is an indoor bike race on a little track that has a LOT of different events including Team & Individual Sprint (speed races), Keirin (a six-lap speed race with a pacer) Team Pursuit (beat/overtake your opponent) Omnium (4 races, one day) and Madison (a two-person endurance relay). There’s a lot of strategy & air resistance calculations involved here- too much for me! How they don’t get dizzy is the real medal-worthy activity. Judo (a sport that was introduced the LAST TIME the games were in Tokyo and will take place in the SAME venue!) taekwondo, boxing, wrestling (freestyle & greco-roman), and I guess arguably fencing (foil, epee, & sabre), are all COMBAT sports: one v one battles of strength and skill where you must FIGHT TO SURVIVE. In the OG Olympics, which was mostly track n’ field events, there were three combat sports: wrestling (the world’s oldest sport!), boxing, and something called “pankration” in which the “only restricted actions were biting and gouging your opponent’s eyes out”. Dunno why they don’t do that one anymore!!!

Outdoor Sports

Ok home stretch here folks! These are some sports ya know & love (tennis joke) including tennis (men & women singles, doubles, mixed), golf (insert eye roll here), and badminton (see table tennis & regular tennis for the general layout of that one, plus I know all my New England readers will know the rules from playing inside in gym from January-March). There’s also some good old timey sports like equestrian (tbh I think the horse is the real athlete here but it includes team & individual dressage, jumping, & eventing), archery (a sport my high school nemesis was supposedly an alternate for, but she was a pathological liar so who knows!) and shooting (a sport we should be better at considering we are BIG on guns here, but ironically, is often dominated by Middle Eastern countries. One of the few sports where you will see Saudis! Includes air rifle, rifle, rapid fire pistol, air pistol, pistol, trap, & skeet none of which I totally understand). There’s roughly a MILLION different cycling events (that’s right, we’re not done even after ALL THAT VELODROME) including some road races, some mountain biking races, a BMX race, and then BMX freestyle (also technically a debut hell yeah X GAMES!).

FINALLY there is the world of athletics, as the entire rest of the world call it, aka track and field. There’s a lot going on here, no one expects you to know them all, but just in case they did…we’ll tell ya! On the track, we’ve got the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, 5000m, & 10000m races, the 100/110m & 400m hurdles , and the 3000m steeplechase (the obstacle course-like one). On the field, we jump & we throw things in the High Jump, Pole Vault, Long Jump, Triple Jump, Shotput (the heavy ball), Discus (the frisbee one), Hammer Throw (you guessed it, a hammer), and the Javelin (the spear one). Then we COMBINE track & field in the men’s decathlon (100m race, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400m race, 110mhurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500m race) (this is supposedly the hardest Olympic discipline and what Caitlyn Jenner was famous for before she married Kris) and the women’s heptathlon (100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m race, Long jump, javelin throw, 800m race). And, of course, on the ROAD portion of athletics, we’ve got some speed walking (a 20km and 50km race, which I do recommend watching for inspo. Weird that more New Yorkers are not race-walking champions because baby we can SPEED WALK! ay I’m WALKIN HERE) and, of course, the marathon. That’s it! We did it!

Now you know ALL THE SPORTS! Yes, some of these seem a little lame, but I really recommend venturing outside of the world of NBC Olympics in primetime (aka just swimming, track n field, and gymnastics) because this is one of the rare times sports like these are on TV and there are some incredible Olympic level feats to see! Records will be broken, tears will be shed, and dreams will be achieved! And who knows, you might find your new calling in one of these kooky new sports.